Donald Trump’s Potemkin Physical with Dr. Oz

On his show, Dr. Oz conducted a strange sort of physical on Donald Trump.

Photograph by Anders Krusberg / Sony Pictures Television

I recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Cambridge, to work on a book project. I hadn’t realized how much my life would change; everyone here seems to exercise all the time, and to eat nothing but fruit and fibre and lean protein. And they go to bed on the same day they wake up. It’s intimidating. So I decided to turn to the one man who could help me shape up and fit in: America’s doctor, Mehmet Oz.

The choices overwhelmed me, so I turned on the television. There, on his own show, Oz was conducting a strange sort of physical on Donald Trump. The examination consisted of Trump handing over a couple of sheets of paper that he said contained the results of tests administered by his own physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein. Bornstein, you might recall, recently wrote that, if elected, Trump would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” a hilarious assertion wholly in keeping with the modesty of his patient.

As Julia Belluz pointed out in a piece for Vox, Oz then essentially conducted a “made-for-TV physical of Trump.” There were “no actual exams, no hands laid on the patient, no verification of the patient’s data. Just a series of questions and the two pieces of paper from Trump.’’

From that paper we learned some really cool things: first, Donald Trump has plenty of testosterone (which delighted the studio audience); he has low blood pressure, and, at six feet three and two hundred and thirty-six pounds, he isn’t even technically obese. Trump informed Oz that he doesn’t “get much with the colds,” and considers waving his arms while giving a speech a form of exercise:

OZ: How do you stay healthy on the campaign trail?

TRUMP: It's a lot of work. When I’m speaking in front of fifteen and twenty thousand people and I’m up there using a lot of motion, I guess in its own way it’s a pretty healthy act. I really enjoy doing it. A lot of times these rooms are very hot, like saunas, and I guess that is a form of exercise and—you know?

Trump went on to say that he viewed coming on Oz’s show “in a way as going to see my doctor . . . It’s just a little bit public.” Oz said nothing to challenge these assertions—or any others. In retrospect, the interview made Matt Lauer, who was harshly criticized for his passive questioning of Trump on NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum,” look like a Doberman.

Oz, despite his gifts as a heart surgeon, has in most meaningful ways turned his back on medicine. He is now primarily an entertainer. “If a patient of mine had these records,” he said, “I’d be very happy, and I’d send them on their way.” It is hard to call any particular exchange in this interview absurd—since the very premise of it was. But in real life, as opposed to reality television, it is hard to imagine that an actual doctor would simply sit in an armchair, read a few “facts” provided by his patient, and then profess to be satisfied enough to send him “on his way.”

Trump did say that if there was “one thing” he might wish to change about himself, it would be his weight. But weirdly, for a show that devotes itself almost daily to diets and dietary supplements, Oz never really challenged Trump’s eating habits—which Trump himself has proudly said include the type of fast food that Oz regularly (and correctly) tells his viewers will kill them. Oz said he wants to offer a “safe space” for the candidates to talk about their health. (He has also invited Hillary Clinton to appear—although she has not yet said whether she will.)

Trump got his safe space, but I wonder if Oz genuinely believes that this kind of Potemkin consultation served his millions of viewers. “I wanted to try to help bring some clarity to the health of the candidates,” Oz said yesterday morning on the* “*Today”* *show. He argued that “we’re a much more informed country today than we were yesterday about the health of our candidates,” and that the Trump appearance on his show was “very logical,” since he could add context instead of just putting the results in a newspaper for people to see themselves.

Oz is not a fool. He cannot possibly believe that kind of nonsense. And he must know that Trump, who lives a nearly fact-free life, will now claim to have released his medical records, which he did not. And he will have Dr. Oz to support him. Despite their tremendous success as reality-television stars, neither man seems capable of accepting reality. They clearly deserve each other—but I am not quite sure the rest of us do.

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.